The service, which won’t go live until later this year, will use high-definition photos taken by members of the public, and overlay it on Microsoft’s Virtual Earth mapping service. It could allow users to get a street-level view of almost anywhere in the world.

According to tech website PocketLint, the service will be called GeoSynth and will based on Microsoft’s existing PhotoSynth technology, which analyses digital photos to generate a three-dimensional model of the subject. It was famously used during Barack Obama’s inauguration to create a 3D representation of the moment the President took the oath of office by ’stitching’ together photos taken at a set time by members of the public standing in a variety of vantage points.

The Microsoft service will allow users to upload geo-tagged images into a central database, which will be combined to build a detailed, larger picture of an area or landmark.

“The system would take the best images from a location to create a single image of a specific landmark very much in the same way Microsoft did with the Obama inauguration”, Johannes Kebeck a Virtual Earth technology specialist at Microsoft, told PocketLint.

Tucked within Apple’s iPhone 3.0 beta firmware are hardware strings that mention not one but two unreleased iPhone models as well as similar changes in store for the iPod touch.

An exploration of device strings by the same source that correctly leaked MMS and tethering ahead of Apple’s iPhone 3.0 preview event now finds that there are at least four and as many as six new devices in the pipeline that would share OS X iPhone as their foundation.

From the week gone by on the directed-energy weapons front: defense contractor Northrop Grumman reported that it got a solid-state laser to fire a beam with a potency of 105.5 kilowatts.

For the ray-gun wing of the military-industrial complex, the 100-kilowatt threshold is a major milestone, marking the entry point to weapons-grade laser weapons. Adding to the appeal is that solid-state lasers are much more compact, and less noxious, than chemical laser systems such as the one in the works for the 747-centric Airborne Laser.

The technical details of Northrop’s achievement break down this way, starting with a modular, “building block” approach that bodes well for scalable systems, the company said:

For building blocks, the company utilizes “laser amplifier chains,” each producing approximately 15kW of power in a high-quality beam. Seven laser chains were combined to produce a single beam of 105.5 kW. The seven-chain JHPSSL laser demonstrator ran for more than five minutes, achieved electro-optical efficiency of 19.3 percent, reaching full power in less than 0.6 seconds, all with beam quality of better than 3.0.

Adding an eighth chain that the system was designed for would increase laser power to 120 kilowatts, Northrop says.

Where this test saw five minutes of continuous operation for the laser, altogether the system has been operated at above 100 kilowatts for a total duration of more than 85 minutes.